Donald Trump told Elon Musk that internal “enemies” were “more dangerous” than foreign adversaries such as Russia and China in a rambling, two-hour conversation on X that was delayed by glitches on the social media platform.
The discussion on Monday, billed by Trump as the “greatest interview ever”, was heard at times by more than 1mn people, according to X, though Musk had prepared for 8mn people to join the talk with the former president, which began 42 minutes later than planned.
Trump has been trying to adjust to a newly competitive race for the White House after vice-president Kamala Harris replaced President Joe Biden as the Democratic party candidate last month.
The discussion underscored Trump’s appeal to Musk, a self-declared “free-speech absolutist” who has moved sharply to the right in recent years and used his social media platform X to promote his ideas on immigration and regulation.
The former president opened the conversation with a lengthy recounting of his attempted assassination in July in Butler, Pennsylvania. Trump said he would return to the town in October, not long before the November election.
He then accused Democrats of engineering a “coup” to replace Biden on the presidential ticket. Musk suggested that the party “took [Biden] out back behind the shed and basically shot him”.
Trump also accused Harris of shifting towards the middle on issues such as immigration, saying she was a “radical left, San Francisco liberal . . . and now she wants to be more Trump than Trump”.
The former president has been struggling to find a coherent line of attack on Harris in recent weeks — including questioning her race — as she has gained ground in the polls. His criticism remained scattered on Monday, and he rarely mentioned Harris by name.
He also raged against his political opponents, declaring that he had “enemies on the outside and enemies on the inside” and that “bad people in our government” were “more dangerous” than foreign adversaries.
The former president praised the leaders of Russia, China and North Korea as “at the top of their game”.
“They are tough, they are smart and they are vicious,” he said.
Musk lavished praise on the former president while repeatedly trying to turn the conversation towards more centrist themes such as immigration, where he praised Trump as a moderate and distinguished between legal and illegal immigration, as well as curbing government spending, and controlling the rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Trump falsely claimed that it was “impossible” to sell US cars in Europe and that it was “very difficult” for American farmers to sell agricultural products overseas. He also greatly overestimated how much aid the US gave to Ukraine in its war against Russia and underestimated aid from Europe.
“We have a deficit with [the EU] of $250bn, which people don’t know,” said Trump. “It sounds so nice — ‘the European Union’. But let me tell you: they’re not as tough as China, but they’re bad. And I let them know it, and that’s probably why they notified you. No, they don’t treat our country well.”
EU commissioner Thierry Breton warned Musk in a letter ahead of the interview against disseminating hate speech or disinformation in violation of the bloc’s Digital Services Act.
Towards the end of the interview, the 78-year-old Trump bashed Biden, who is 81, for being “close to a vegetable state”. Musk responded: “We just don’t have a president right now.”
The Harris campaign noted that Musk had said in 2022 that Trump would be 82 at the end of another presidential term, “which is too old to be chief executive of anything, let alone the United States of America”.
A spokesperson for the Harris campaign said that Trump’s “extremism” was on “full display for those unlucky enough to listen in tonight” after the interview.
“Trump’s entire campaign is in service of people like Elon Musk and himself — self-obsessed rich guys who will sell out the middle class.”